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National Geographic : 1950 Jun
Contents
Montana, Shining Mountain Treasureland but our cage, the top one, was pretty tight with only seven passengers. Doors clanged shut, a bell sounded, and down we dropped at breathless speed to the 3,100-foot level. No Place for a Mollycoddle There we got out, and a mine foreman with the agility of a mountain goat led us through a tunnel to the foot of a stope where a huge cascade of ore had just been blasted from the wall. The foreman swarmed up a ladder and I lumbered after him. When I got to the top of the ladder, the foreman called out from somewhere behind me, "Come over here." I planted my gum shoes precariously on the ore pile and inched around to see him ten feet away beyond a horizontal log that would have to be scaled at risk of life and limb. Completely winded, I gasped, "I hate to be a mollycoddle, but I can't make it." We climbed down to the tunnel floor, and after I had recovered my breath walked what seemed a mile to the foot of another stope. The going along the ore train tracks was ,uneven and a little slippery in spots, but I got along fairly well save when my helmet collided with the large canvas ventilation tube suspended from the tunnel roof. Once we huddled into a safety corner while a long train of ore cars rumbled by. I climbed another ladder and, with the aid of my acrobatic guide, clawed to the top of an ore pile. Men with pneumatic rock drills were working on the walls of the stope. Back at the elevator station, a work shift was waiting to go up. "Whew!" I said to the engineer when the elevator whisked back to the surface and we got out of the cage. "What a tough way to earn a living this mining is!" The foreman bridled. "I like it; my father and grandfather both worked here and liked it. It's not hard after you get used to it." With the embarrassed feeling that I had given the miners a good laugh, I clop-clopped over to the supply room to surrender my tor turing helmet. There are 14 hoisting shafts on the Butte Hill and 30 shafts for ventilating and servicing the operating areas. To insure safety, all the mines are connected by underground passages, and in case of accident in any one of them the workers can walk to another and ascend to the surface. Relieving men of much of the backbreaking toil of former years, power-driven scrapers and mucking machines are employed. The mines use 50,000 horsepower of electricity supplied by the Montana Power Company, a concern entirely independent of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Between the two the only connection is that the mines are the best customers of the power producers. That night Bob, Mrs. Fletcher, and I went to the Italian settlement in Meaderville for dinner at "Teddy's" Rocky Mountain Cafe. The meal, perfectly cooked, and made par ticularly tempting by an array of unusual hours d'oeuvres, was a gourmet's delight. When my stupendous tenderloin steak was set before me, I heard a guest at the next table ask a waiter, "What is that, a roast?" Teddy came to this country from Dalmatia years ago as a penniless boy. He has lost two or three fortunes and has always come back to make another. The next morning I went to Anaconda to see some of the ore I had watched mined in the Leonard go through the smelter. Years ago when copper was smelted in Butte, the air all over the city was so thick with sulphur fumes from low-surface roasting and furnace chimneys that street lights had to be turned on in daytime, and not a spear of grass could live except under glass. Now the smelters are located on a hilltop in Anaconda, 25 miles away, and the fumes from the furnaces are carried off with little harm to vegetation by the largest smokestack in the world-585 feet high (page 696). Trees, grass, and flowers are gradually covering the once barren landscape in Butte. Copper Ore Taken for a Ride Superintendent Charles A. Lemmon showed me through the huge Anaconda Reduction Works. At the top of the hill we watched steel cars full of ore tipped bodily so that their con tents fell roaring into a hopper of 200-ton capacity. From a gargantuan crusher below this the ore emerged in lumps not more than four inches in diameter. A second crusher, working like a coffee grinder, then reduced the four-inch pieces to one-inch diameter. Now the small bits of ore went into churn like ball mills and a series of roller crushers which pulverized them to the fineness of flour. By mechanical means the powdered ore, still 80 per cent waste, was carried into chutes of running water, called launders, to flotation machines where it was agitated and aerated with oils and chemical compounds. This process seemed to me to make the law of gravitation operate upside down, for the heavier, valuable minerals, attracted by the oil and chemical bubbles, floated to the surface, and the lighter, waste material sank to the 709
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